In the End

A short, bleak story about the end of the world and those who inhabit it.

Submitted:Aug 20, 2014
Reads: 46
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In the end, the world was dying. The world didn't
excel into the glimmering future of chrome and holograms. The
technological advances were not made because the money to fund
them was scarce; the resources, even scarcer. The world became
bitter, fighting over what was left of the non-renewable
resources. The constant war exhausted the nations of their moral.
The rich stayed rich and the poor slowly ebbed away, filling the
ground, and eventually, the streets.

It was a meteor that ended the misery. In the silence
of space, it soared to its destination. Turning over and over in
the vacuum. Summersaulting like a gymnast. At night it appeared
as a star, by day, nothing. It was stealthy, unseen, and with no
space programs to spot the beast, it remained that way.

Brighter and brighter it became in the night. To a
dying boy in India, as he lay on the dry earth, it became the
last thing he saw before closing his eyes forever. To a woman in
America, while having an affair with her neighbor's husband, she
spotted it blinking at her through the bedroom window as the man
on top of her thrusted his pelvis against the wet spot between
her legs. She closed her eyes as the euphoria of orgasm flooded
over her body, clutching the sheets that her two children were
conceived on.

The world pecked on, like a chicken finding the last
of the seed within the brown grass. The smoke of war floated into
the sky and mixed in with the beige clouds.

Some of the wars were over religions that weren't
real, and as a man in Israel clutched his dying child in his
arms, he realized this. On the other side of the globe, two men
in love who never had the chance to become parents held each
other while lying in their bed, crying softly.

The giant rock came closer still. It became apparent
to the living that the growing light against the inky black of
night was something more than a celestial star.

It was Earth who decided to kill itself. Gravity took
hold of the rock that was destined to hit the Mother of Life, the
muse that so many wrote about.

Thousands and thousands of people wrote about the
beauty of Earth, its riches and plethora of life.

Billions of people fell in love on Earth.

Billions of people didn't.

Music of dead musicians filled the ears of the young
and old.

A deer in a forest chewed on some leaves.

A desperate, famished person shot it.

Everything that everyone had done was in vain because
there was nothing to live on after it was gone.

The meteor hit the earth at all different times
because humans perceived time differently. It was dark to some,
light to others. However, it all became dark, eventually.

The earth shuttered its last breath as the fire tore
across the crust. The blue atmosphere disintegrated, peeling off
the planet.

Everyone closed their eyes when the flames hit.
Clutching each other, or themselves. Crying. Silent. Screaming.

And
then it was over. Nothing existed anymore except a raw, roaring,
ragged planet.